Electromagnetic waves may be transferred from place to place through a conductor. In wired transmission, the conductor is usually a wire or other solid substance. In wireless transmission, the conductor is usually an ambient substance, such as air, water, etc. In wireless connections a transmitter is usually used to transfer a wave and a receiver to receive a wave. A transceiver combines the functions of both transmitter and receiver in one system. A transmitter typically converts electrical energy into a signal, which is then broadcast via an antenna to a receiver's antenna. Repeaters, middle stations, etc. may be used as intermediates in the transmission to sustain the integrity of the transmitted wave.
The electrical energy input into a transmitter usually is modulated into a basic transmission or carrier signal by overlaying some intelligence upon the energy—speech, data, etc.—in the form of an information signal, and the receiver typically demodulates the modulated carrier signal, once received, into a copy of the initial intelligence sent by the transmitter.
In order to accomplish their function, transmitters and receivers are comprised of various building block components. The information signal, for example, may be generated or modulated by one or more transducers, such as a microphone. It may also be generated by a modulator, such as an analog modem. The modulation of the information signal onto the carrier signal may be done by a mixer and the energy or carrier wave itself is usually generated by an oscillator. An amplifier is usually used at one or more places in the transmitter circuitry to boost the signal strength, to provide power to active components, etc. Similarly, one or more filters are usually used as well, to clean up the input signal, the outputted signal, etc. An antenna is used to broadcast the signal, and a power supply will supply power as needed.
The components of a receiver are similar, and indeed, as noted above, transceivers combine both transmitters and receivers. In a transceiver, separate components may be used for the transmitter and receiver, or, one or more devices providing for switching are used to turn on respective transmitter and receiver components as needed.
Various techniques may be used to actually transfer the intelligence. For example, electromagnetic waves representing the information signal in wireless transmission are modulated into carrier signals by varying wave characteristics such as amplitude, frequency and phase, in an analog or digital manner. During this process, one or more aspects of the electromagnetic wave may be represented as one or more coordinates on a graph, which describe that aspect. For example, aspects of an electromagnetic signal wave may be calculated using rectangular coordinates representative of the in-phase and quadrature phase components of the signal, known as I,Q data. This I,Q data may be used to process the signal wave.
In many systems used for processing electromagnetic waves, however, it may be advantageous to use a polar representation of aspects of the electromagnetic wave instead of rectangular coordinates. Because of drawbacks in conventional systems, it would be desirable to provide more efficient and precise methods and articles of manufacture processing electromagnetic waves in this manner.